Mirror, mirror
by Merrin
Summary: Set in early season 6, before OMWF, when Buffy and Spike had started a cautious companionship. Did Spike try to help Buffy with her money troubles? Who would hire a former Big Bad?


_This_ is how her kisses would be, he told himself...

_Liquid, and searing_.

He swirled the alcohol with his tongue, let it eat at the tender flesh inside his mouth. Shouldn't do that with the hard stuff; it's supposed to go down fast.

He luxuriated in the cheap whiskey's burn for a moment longer before he swallowed it. He liked to think that it singed the demon soul on its way down.

Spike was at the bar, drinking by himself--happened often enough. He'd already had the 'next' drink, the one after that, and the one after that. He tilted his glass between thumb and forefinger, watching the light tremble in the brown-gold liquid.

Glancing up at the mirror on the wall behind the bar, Spike focused on the spot where his own reflection should have been staring back at him.

_Claude Rains. Fancy meetin' you here._

He looked around. Windowless, dimly lit: the demon bar was a cool, damp cave with smoke hanging permanently in the air. The large room was more crowded than Spike had realized because the mirror reflected fewer than half of the patrons.

There were many odors beneath the acrid layer of cigarette smoke: things that were wet and mossy, alive and dead at the same time. Spike barely glanced at the end of the bar to observe a fight that started with profanity and ended with the smell of demon blood.

Had other worries, hadn't he? No job history, no references, no proper identification. Hard to get work when you're the invisible man.

Of course, there were black markets in the demon world that trafficked in unspeakable things. Not hard to find gainful employment there. She didn't need to know where the money came from.

He shouldn't have a problem with it. So why...

"Can I buy you a drink?" The voice was deep and husky, but decidedly female. Spike caught the human scent: metallic musk filtering through an aggressive floral perfume.

Spike tilted his head to look at the woman standing next to him at the bar: she was a blonde, mid-forties at least, with hair stiffly hair-sprayed to the consistency of cotton candy. She had to be a heavy smoker, with the wrinkles around her mouth that came from puckering lips around a cigarette. At least a pack a day, he figured.

"I'll be happy to take a drink. If that's what you're offering..." Spike watched the woman converse briskly with the bartender. "Y'know where you are, love?"

"Of course," she said, as her eyes moved meaningfully from Spike toward the demon sitting at a nearby table; the creature's large sprouting antlers dripped with slime that puddled around the legs of his chair.

The woman leaned an elbow on the bar, put two cigarettes between her lips, and lit them with practiced ease. She took one and held it out to Spike while she dangled the other off her bottom lip.

He took the burning offering. "Comin' here?" he said, "Like takin' a dip in the Nile to see how the crocs like the water."

"Honey, I'm from Hollywood. _They've all got teeth_." The woman's eyes caught a greenish glint of light from somewhere in the shadowy bar. "Here," she said, sliding a business card into his hand.

"_...Talent Agent_," he read beneath her name. "You do this often, do you?"

"Haven't you heard? Hollywood is full of bloodsuckers."

The bartender thumped a full shot glass on the bar in front of Spike, who raised it to his benefactress, then downed the contents in one gulp.

"Of course, you'd have to be bonded: no biting while you're on the job. And we'll need a W2." Off Spike's blank stare, she added, "We can provide you with a social security number, no problem."

He considered, then favored her with an almost flirtatious tilt of his head. "So you think I could be a movie actor?" he asked.

"Not really."

"Oh." Spike flipped his collar up, striking a pose he knew was devastatingly sexy. He could feel it all the way down to his pelvis. "Star of my own TV show?" he asked.

"Nope," the woman said.

He blinked, nonplused. "Well, then..." he pouted, bleeding from minor psychic wounds.

"I need a celebrity look-alike for a nostalgia-themed party this weekend." She watched Spike's expression curdle. "One of my regulars crapped out on me, so..."

"Don't need to dress up like someone else, love. I'm the bloody original."

"Uh huh." Her eyes caught the light again. "If you show up on time and don't screw it up, I'll put you on my call list." She was unfazed by Spike's disgust. "It's a good living, trust me."

"How do you know I won't just make myself a human smorgasbord at your little shindig?" He assumed she didn't know that he _couldn't_ do that, what with the chip and all, or that he _wouldn't_ do it, even if he _could_, because...

She raised an eyebrow. "Call me," she said. She squeezed his arm, made a small 'o' face over the hard muscle there, then slid past him.

He watched as the woman stopped to chat with Clem, the tall, floppy-skinned demon Spike knew from the poker games in the back room.

Spike stared at the card, not contemplating his long-lost dignity, or his tattered Big Bad reputation, or the bloody irony of a master vampire needin' a friggin' social security number. He was thinking about Buffy's soggy basement.

Spike tucked the business card into his coat pocket.

----

_I wore get-ups like this. Back in the seventies. What the bloody hell was I thinkin' and why the hell did Dru let me out the door lookin' like this?_

Spike shifted uncomfortably in the chair.

_Damned leather togs. Grand-sire likes 'em... thinks he looks the manful man._

_Jackass._

A no-nonsense, middle-aged woman, human, with gray-streaked black hair pulled tightly into a ponytail was applying eyeliner under Spike's eyes. She seemed to be a veteran of this particular circus; she had ushered Spike to a seat in front of a large dressing room mirror--his lack of a reflection hadn't prompted so much as a blink from her.

"Okay, hon, try a bit of that sneer."

He obeyed as she slicked thick gel into his hair, and pulled it straight up between her fingers.

"Uh huh. Bit more curl of the lip."

He performed obediently, silently worried that he was being afflicted with a crap Angel-do.

"Love it!" The woman smiled a proud, maternal smile. "Now raise your fist." Spike raised his arm stiffly. She grinned, "The spitting image."

Spike looked sideways at her. Just now, it would have been nice to be able to see his reflection in the mirror, so he'd know how big a ponce he was making of himself.

"All you have to do is mingle, be part of the atmosphere," the woman said as she patted him on the back. "Good luck, sweetie."

----------

The large room was a cacophony of lights, a blur of chandeliers and jewelry and crystal champagne flutes reflecting off of each other, and...

...shiny suits and satin black dresses; whiter-than-white teeth and man-made tans. Lips looked filled to bursting, faces were taut, with surgically-stretched skin pulling nostrils into gaping black holes.

It was true that more than a few of Spike's friends and acquaintances were dead, mostly dead, or recently dead, but it was these wanna-bes with their death masks made of botox-filled flesh who gave him the creeps.

Spike 'mingled' for almost an hour, nodding surreptitiously to other celebrity impersonators: here was _Ed Sullivan-Elvis_ (vamp), and over there, _Viva Las Vegas-Elvis_. He bummed a cigarette from _Overweight, white-jumpsuited Elvis_, and tucked it into his vest pocket.

On his way toward a side door, nicotine-starved, Spike caught sight of a girl in a plaid outfit with an extremely short skirt. He knew it was supposed to look like a school uniform: a little girl's knickers on a ready-to-burst nymphet's body.

This bird didn't quite fill it out. Instead of looking like a sex kitten, she was the picture of a lost little girl. The young woman turned part-way toward him.

_Bloody... Hell_...

"Buffy?"

Of course.

She looked up, eyes wide. "Oh God. What are you doing here?" Buffy's gaze traveled over Spike's outfit, over his smoothly muscled arms, and over his bare chest exposed through the opening of the black leather vest, then hovered at the top of his low-slung leather trousers.

"I'm... Billy Idol. Not a word," he warned her. "And who are you supposed to be, Slayer?"

She folded her arms over her chest. "Britney Spears," she mumbled, pink spreading across her cheeks.

_What the...? _ Even the old, evil Spike would have been offended on the Slayer's behalf. It made him a bit queasy to feel pity for the Slayer, so he shook it off.

"First off," Spike said, "You've got it all wrong."

"Big fan, huh?" she sneered.

"Not gonna dignify that, Slayer. Fact is, you need someone to dress you before you leave the house."

She was biting her lip. Spike could so easily conjure the image of her soft lips between his teeth, the liquid warmth of her mouth waiting for him to explore...

A damned miracle his legs didn't buckle at images like that.

Buffy was oblivious to his fantasies; her expression was sour. "If I needed your help, Spike..."

Without waiting for her to rev up to full-fledged Slayer-style rant, Spike reached over and pulled out the collar that was tucked inside the neckline of her shirt. He lightly held the triangle of fabric with two fingers, careful not to brush against her skin.

He was surprised his hand wasn't shaking.

Her words trailed off and Buffy's eyes locked with his. The black pools of her pupils pulled him to look closer. Was there an elusive image, something more than the light shining back at him?

She turned her gaze from his, and Spike felt the whisper of her breath against his fingers. He jerked his hand away, as if her warmth were a hellfire, as if his flesh had been burned.

"Hey, look over there," Spike said, seizing on a topic of conversation. "There's _Bill Clinton_. Hitting on that girl with the big..."

"Check out _Cher_. Fake_Cher_ is always a guy now, huh?"

"Least he doesn't have to worry about some society matron making a grab for his privates," Spike grumbled.

Buffy raised an eyebrow.

"Got so many handprints on my ass... Things haven't much changed since the nineteenth century, you know; the upper crust can't keep their hands off the hired help."

"Yeah," she said, "I'm well aware."

"You want me to take the boy to task, Slayer?" He said it lightly, but Spike's jaw muscle clenched as he felt an eagerness to hurt whoever'd had his hand on the Slayer so casually.

"Thanks," Buffy smirked. "I can take care of myself."

_Bloody right she can._ He couldn't keep the admiration out of his eyes. _Gotta stop doing that, Spike, wearin' your heart on the proverbial sleeve; you won't be able to spend time with the girl any longer._

That would be too much of a loss to contemplate.

_Keep the conversation going, idiot._ Clearing his throat, he said, 'So, who's the worst look-alike at this bash, ya think?'

"Hmmm..." Buffy's eyes swept the ballroom.

As he watched her profile, Spike could track the subtle shifts of mood across her features, could see the bleakness take over her face. He knew where Buffy was going, and because she was headed for the bloody bog, the frellin' pit of despair, then so was he. He couldn't do anything but follow her.

Spike slouched next to Buffy, leaning against a table. Two matching gazes stared vacantly through the party scene in front of them as a serene Barbra Streisand glided by.

"Crap. This just... sucks," Buffy said. "_I_ suck. They should fire me." Buffy took a slow breath, "It was either this or flipping burgers."

"Won't come to that," Spike said.

She smiled feebly. "S'okay. It's time I explored polyester as a fashion statement, anyway."

They were both quiet for a moment.

'I can help.' Spike said. He wasn't sure she had heard him, she was so silent and still. 'This is a wanker's job, but...'

'No,' she said.

That was all. Just... _no._

Her 'no' took all the fight out of him; she was kicking his ass, like always. Metaphorically speaking.

He'd much prefer the real thing.

Buffy was looking at something past his shoulder. Spike turned his head to see where her gaze was fixed.

A mirror: she was staring at her own reflection. The glitter of the ballroom was there, but Buffy was a solitary figure against the noisy backdrop. There was no sign of Spike in her own private hell; she was alone.

Spike contemplated his absent reflection for a moment, then... "Slayer?"

Buffy's eyes shifted toward him, her features slack, as if she were staring through him.

"Seems I forgot somethin' important." Spike said.

Was she looking at him, finally?

"Vamps don't work for a livin'." He shrugged out of the black leather vest and slung it over his shoulder. "It's in our _Constitution. _The frickin' _Magna Carta_." He nodded. "See you 'round the graveyard."


End file.
